When a frustrated teenager, Mireille herself flirted with atheism. Or was it agnosticism? She couldn’t recall now what proud label she might have boasted of back then if she weren’t always so shy. In a series of sudden increments and entanglements with the outside, young Mireille had come to a form of realization that she could at the time encapsulate in the phrase “this world is bullshit!”

With so many angles at which to aim angst, that dour fury for a deceitful world presented to her daily would first find it’s big target with both the concept of God and how sanction houses implemented that concept upon us. As time went on, however, Mireille’s perception of “bullshit” refined. Yes, she came to realize, it was all that, in the sense that the bulk of our world was made up. Yet, she couldn’t say that it wasn’t “real.” She felt it. Everday.

So, if it all was real and likewise made up: “well then what does that say about the nature of reality?” she had questioned; “well then what does that say about me?” Does existence possess a complex geometry where opposed sides fold simply to be true and false simultaneously; where one should negate the other and thus both but don’t and in fact supports them together and perhaps much more? Like many teens she started to harbor these suspicions, but without the luxury of much of a lexicon to crowd them into shape, into an ethos—and so there was: this world is bullshit! Mireille began to feel that The World was nothing but ideas made manifest; condensed into a solid; a tangible vibration; a consequence of narratives; a frequency captured by the little shell of the ear; the collection of light by the adjustable assembly of lenses, tunics, apertures that is the eye; and all those other instruments; implemented in systems we’re born in and learn to inhabit…like currency for example…or race. As time went on, however, she came to realize that she could appositely replace the word “implemented” with that of “manipulated.”

At the age of seventeen she had spent the majority of one particular November afternoon at her local public library working on a report for school that pertained to the causes and outcomes of The Cold War. Seated at a laminate table crowded with splayed textbooks and a marble notebook, she fell away from the task at hand. After hours of study and note jotting she had grown bored by the “death strip” of the Berlin Wall, bored of dead Kennedy, bored of Premier Khrushchev, bored of primate-patriarch Reagan, and bored even by chants of “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”). The focus of her vision blurred towards the white between the printed words before her.